Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Samsung
Releases Its Comprehensive Mobile Solution For Work and Play - Called
KNOX™ - It Offer a Complete Lifestyle Package for BYOD

Samsung entered the BYOD enterprise space with its SAFE Enterprise program which it touted as “solutions that include the necessary security and feature enhancements suitable for business use.” SAFE has had a reasonable reception in the IT community, but has really been focused on the Enterprise side of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)

At this year’s Mobile World Congress, Samsung announced that it has taken its BYOD offerings to the next level by add some extra layers of security and usability features and calling the new program KNOX.

Samsung KNOX will now offer a ‘container solution’ that separates work and play on your smartphone. Samsung stated that this will be easily accessible from the KNOX icon (container) on the home screen and will feature applications and solutions that users need for work. In essence it is a complete lifestyle package for work, life and play.

Some of the apps will include email, contacts, calendar, file sharing, collaboration, a browser and more. KNOX container will present these in a secure environment and keep the personal and work side completely separate, which is what most IT departments will find as the key selling point.

Even though KNOX gives the IT department and users what they want, Samsung also made sure this will work for the developers as well. According to details provided, Samsung KNOX will be able to allow existing Android apps to “gain enterprise integration and validated, robust security with zero change to the application source code.”

Samsung has positioned KNOX as an end-to-end solution that is easy for all sides to integrate and satisfied the User, IT departments and App developers.

So far Samsung has not offered the key details such as exactly when it will be available and what costs will be involved, but what we have seen is that KNOX will be “commercially available in selected Samsung GALAXY devices” beginning in the second quarter.

We may get more info on KNOX when the Galaxy S IV is announced on March 14 in New York City.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Apple Stores Are The 3rd Largest Consumer Technology Retailer In The US

The NPD Group on Tuesday (2/19/13) revealed that Apple accounted for 19.9 percent of all domestic consumer technology sales, based on revenue, from last year. That number was up from the 17.3 percent share Apple took in 2011.

"While sales fell in consumer technology for the second consecutive year, there was an uptick in Q4 which is cause for optimism," said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD. "After struggles with declining categories, and increasingly saturated markets over the last few years, fourth quarter’s results may be the first sign that even as a mature industry consumer technology can grow again, albeit with a very different dynamic than in previous growth spurts."

Basically, the top five companies by sales revenue, saw their share of revenue fall in 2012, but Apple and Samsung both saw revenue gains. Together, Apple and Samsung accounted for $6.5 billion in increased sales in 2012. Meanwhile, the rest of the consumer technology industry saw sales decline by almost $9.5 billion in the U.S.

Apple is clearly the leader with 19.9% of sales, with Samsung following with 9.3%. despite the gains seen by Apple and Samsung, retail sales in U.S. consumer technology declined 2 percent to $143 billion in 2012, according to NPD. Sales were also off less than 1 percent in 2011.

"The fact is that the stellar growth of the past few years has made growth today more difficult," Baker said. "Most market segments have high penetration rates and the demand for additional devices is slowing, or declining. Tablets and smartphones have been able to stimulate demand for additional devices, but unfortunately it hasn’t been enough, yet, to sustain positive growth trends."

The only two categories in the top five to see year-over-year growth were tablets and smartphones, markets where Apple competes with the iPad and iPhone.

The one market among the top five where Apple does not have a presence is flat-panel television sets, though there have been indications for years that the company may be interested in entering that market. NPD said that in 2012, HDTVs were "mired in a cycle of declining prices and weak volume."

While smartphone sales were up 25 percent and tablets surged 42 percent, flat-panel TVs saw sales decline by 7 percent. Notebook computers were also off 9 percent at U.S. retailers in 2012, while desktops slid 11 percent.

Monday, February 11, 2013

Think your romps through the gardens of social media are private, think
again!Raytheon, the world's fifth largest defense contractor and a large
multinational security firm, has secretly developed software capable of
tracking people's movements and predicting future behavior by mining data from social
networking websites like Facebook and Twitter and Foursquare.

In video obtained by the British newpaper the Guardian, reveals how an
"extreme-scale analytics" system created by Raytheon can gather vast
amounts of information about people from social media websites.